For a Compassionate Dictatorship of the Proletariat

María Matienzo Puerto

HAVANA TIMES — Is there compassion in socialism? Apparently there is, or so claims Mayra Espina, currently working as a researcher at Cuba’s Center for Psychological and Sociological Studies, located in Vedado, Havana. The question is the title of yet another public conference held in Havana’s Dominican convent of San Juan de Letran.

I’ll come clean. I didn’t have the patience that one would need to stay till the end of the conference. I couldn’t sit through so many lectures filled with false modesty and evasive arguments, lectures which conclude with the insight that the reason Cuba was unable to create a more just society are the shortcomings of the proletariat.

The proletariat, a social class which, in Cuba, has no power to decide anything, regardless of what those who insist this is their “dictatorship” say.

In the first ten minutes of her lecture, Espina thanked the convent for hosting the conference and recalled her first lecture at the venue, when she was invited to speak of poverty. Twenty minutes into the conference, she had only just finished an overview of the secular, biblical and Buddhist notions of compassion and was beginning to expound on a thick tangle of concepts, through a winding argument in which socialism always came out victorious.

On this point, she made a clarification: she wasn’t speaking of a bipolar world, but of an issue that had become considerably more complex in the course of time.

Thirty minutes from the word go, she was already explaining how bad the forms of socialism that some countries in Europe have adopted are, to begin delving into how ideal Marxist socialism is.

She spoke of Latin America, where this philosophy has been materialized in different ways. Confessing she was not an expert on the subject, she invoked the case of Venezuela, which, according to her, is not undertaking any drastic privatizations, but rather creating a parallel economy.

She also made mention of Ecuador and Brazil, countries far less radical than Cuba in their domestic policies, whose economic growth suggests they have known how to establish a fruitful dialogue between the Left and market economies, private companies and the bourgeoisie.

Then, “proletarian internationalism”, “collectives”, “non-competitiveness”, “social property”, “State property”, “no exploitation”, “expropriation of goods” and similar phrases began to fill the slides of her Power Point presentation.

The evasive arguments were still unfolding forty minutes into her lecture, when I decided to get up and leave. She hadn’t yet reached the point where I’d find out what form of socialism we Cubans had gotten, and, judging by how slowly she was developing her arguments, I doubt she ever got to address that issue.

We know which one we got anyways.

The most messed up of all forms of socialism, where no one sees any progress and the economy doesn’t get back on its feet because far too much is invested in political propaganda.

We got the kind of socialism where the masses, the collective “we”, have become the pretext to stifle any attempt at individual development, where the alleged plurality of opinions is a farce (and we’ve seen more than one example of this recently), where no one feels any compassion towards anyone, where surviving is the order of the day and young people flee the country en masse.